Published 4:00 am, Sunday, February 15, 1998

BIRTHDAY LETTERS

By Ted Hughes Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 198 pages; $20
Acclaimed British poet Ted Hughes ("Crow," "Lupercal," "The Hawk in the Rain") is the only poet of distinction to hold the post of England's poet laureate since Lord Tennyson. But Hughes is a well-known literary figure for another reason: He was married to the brilliant American poet Sylvia Plath, whose suicide in 1963 launched a literary industry surrounding her poems and her tragic life.

Until now, with the publication of "Birthday Letters" -- poems written over 25 years and devoted entirely to memories of his wife -- Hughes has maintained a strict public silence about his years with Plath. This reticence, along with his jealous guardianship of her literary estate -- Hughes took it on himself to destroy Plath's last journal -- have served to fuel a long-standing animosity toward Hughes by many of Plath's admirers. Some blamed Hughes openly for precipitating her death, which followed his abandonment of Plath and their two young children for Assia Wevill. Plath's fiercest supporters have even chipped Hughes' name off her headstone in Britain.

The story of Wevill is grimmer yet. When the guilt-ridden Hughes could no longer contemplate a life with her, Wevill killed herself along with their 2-year-old child, pointedly using gas, the same method as Plath had used.

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Into this enduringly tense and tortured saga, Hughes' volume of "Birthday Letters" has arrived like a bombshell, its impending publication kept secret to maximize the poems' impact. Here we have a unique conjunction of life and literature: a tragic love story linking two of the finest poets of the century, retold in a verse elegy by the survivor of that story, at the height of his poetic powers, after a clamorous silence of 35 years.

More remarkable still, "Birthday Letters" lives up to its extraordinary place in literary biography. The poems are candid, masterly in their control of metaphor, fluent, lucid and consistently affecting. They form a narrative as painstakingly sequential as any of the biographies that have sought to guess at the truth about the marriage of these two inspired and tormented poets.

"Birthday Letters" is a novel in verse, revisiting the successive staging posts of Hughes' relationship with Plath that others have so often scoured for meaning: the fateful meeting at Cambridge, the whirlwind courtship, the persistent intimations of disaster, the futile travels and the dismal returns to a dreary, snobbish postwar Britain that helped to smother Plath's volatile, hypersensitive spirit.

Writing not only about Plath but to her -- all but two of the 88 poems address themselves directly to a "you" that is Sylvia -- Hughes brings Plath to life, as alive as she clearly still is in Hughes' soul and imagination. This sense of a continuing dialogue rips aside the shallow myth of Hughes' armored distance from his wife's tragic life and death.

The immediacy of the writing is its most harrowing attribute. These are not merely finely contrived poems as they certainly are among the finest Hughes has ever written; they have a conversational quality, an accessibility in the midst of the most resonant metaphors, that Hughes has never before achieved. Among all his memorable books of verse, "Birthday Letters" stands out as a poetic landmark.

"Where was it, in the Strand?" So the first poem begins -- and we know that a kind of detective story has begun: A display/ Of news items, in photographs . . ./ A picture of that year's intake/ Of Fulbright Scholars. Just arriving --/ Or arrived. Or some of them./ Were you among them? I studied it."

It is already as if fated: Soon they meet and fall in love, falling helplessly "In a barrel together/ Over some Niagara." And yet "I heard/ Without ceasing for a moment to kiss you/ As if a sober star had whispered it/ Above the revolving, rumbling city: stay clear."

Hughes knows about Plath's earlier suicide attempt, as a 20-year-old at college. But he plunges in, "Like a guide dog, loyal to correct your stumblings."

As their love proceeds through marriage to parenthood, haunted by Plath's inner torments and obses sions, Hughes casts himself as bewildered nurse, agonized witness ("What I remember/ Is thinking: She'll do something crazy . . .") and victim of her craziness: "So I had no idea I had stepped/ Into the telescopic sights/ Of the paparazzo sniper/ Nested in your brown iris."

Simple, magisterial and intimate, these hauntingly painful poems nonetheless retain a disturbing element of that remoteness on Hughes' part that has provoked so much fury from defenders of Plath's memory. In these poems, Hughes casts himself as fretfully aghast, prophetically alert or temporarily blind; but always impotent, at the mercy of her delusions.

At times Hughes seems positively absent from the story except as observer. He is troublingly missing in the dozen or so mentions of their children, whom he invariably calls "your children," "your daughter," even as he makes Plath glowingly present for us. It is as if the contagion of her madness still threatens the speaker so intimately that he hardly dares acknowledge their children as his own.

After Plath's first attempted suicide, the electrocution treatment she had been subjected to left lasting damage. Poem after poem insists that Plath was doomed, that her demons, already rampant when she met Hughes, were certain to devour her. Perhaps so -- but who, no matter how well they know another person, can be sure? And there is a paradox: An utterly doomed Plath, as Hughes portrays her, makes his desertion of her seem at first sight less culpable -- since she would have killed herself anyway, sooner or later.

Yet it also prompts the thought that if Hughes was truly certain -- and such certainty from the vantage point of hindsight is too self-serving for comfort -- that Plath would do away with herself, it makes his abandonment of her and their children even more shameful than most commentators have dared to suggest.

It gets worse. "Dreamers," a truly vile poem about Wevill, begins by blaming it all on her: "We didn't find her -- she found us./ She sniffed us out." And it then proceeds to portray Wevill as the silent-movie seductress: "She sat there, in her soot-wet mascara,/ In flame-orange silks, in gold bracelets,/ Slightly filthy with erotic mystery --/ A German/ Russian Israeli with the gaze of a demon . . ."

Wevill isn't named; indeed, such passages, like many in "Birthday Letters," are meaningless to any reader without prior knowledge of the people and the events in question. This reflection forces a wider question: Is this what the most momentous poetry of our time has come to? Gilded gossip? Glittering footnotes to biography?

As Hughes puts it in the words that conclude "Visit," one of the early poems in the cycle: "It is only a story./ Your story. My story." The plain words combine pathos and a kind of buried boastfulness that bring us very close to bathos -- to laying bare the limits of confessional poetry.

The vanishing act on the part of the narrator, once the tremendous backwash of Hughes' verse has dissipated in the reader's mind, leaves unchanged a vista that this volume might have been expected to alter,if only a little: Hughes' and Plath's respective places in 20th century literature.

As fine a poet as Hughes is, truly a match for Plath, her sacrifice -- whether or not it was fated -- continues to dwarf his role as poet and husband. And, as this volume makes amply clear, it always will. Who, in fact, is the survivor here? Since Plath's death, Hughes has become "Sylvia Plath's husband." The fascination of "Birthday Letters" is, after all, to learn more about her, and only secondly about him.